Fun with Rogers Home Phone
I'm having fun with Rogers these days, trying to get my Home Phone service working reliably.
I can't receive some incoming calls. It's the "some" part that makes it difficult to diagnose, I suppose, but their process for dealing with this problem has been terrible.
The problem is that certain people can't call my home phone number. When these people call, instead of ringing the phone at my house, they're instantly given a message to the effect of "The subscriber you have called has not activated their voice mail".
It only seems to be Bell customers who get this, and not all Bell customers. I'm guessing there's an incorrect entry in a database somewhere, but I don't know enough about how the connection between Bell and Rogers works to even guess.
Problems happen, of course, but the way Rogers is handling it is what's frustrating.
First time I called, I gave them the information on the problem and they created a ticket. I didn't hear back from them, so I assumed they'd fixed the problem, until the next time someone told me they tried to call at a time when I was at home. I called Rogers back and they said that they needed more information. Apparently they tried to call me, but there was no answer.
Note to Rogers: If the customer's problem is that they can't receive incoming calls, trying to contact them on their home phone number may not work.
So they had closed my ticket. When I called back they asked for some specific information on numbers that had tried to call me and times. I gave them this information and again forgot about the problem.
This morning the problem came up again, so I called Rogers and found out that they had once again closed the ticket. They needed more information. But the information they needed was the information I gave them in the previous call - they somehow failed to pass it on to the people who were trying to solve the problem.
I've never worked in a customer service organization, but I expected that you wouldn't be able to "close" a ticket until the customer had verified that the problem was resolved. In software development, I get to mark a bug as "fixed" but it's not until the testers verify that it's fixed that the bug gets marked as "closed". I don't even have rights to mark a bug as "closed". A call center should work the same way.
This time, I've given them 24 hours to give me a status update or I'm switching back to Bell (or Vonage or something.. I'll cross that bridge when I get to it). The threat of losing a customer sometimes lights a fire under their collective bums; we'll see what happens.
BTW, a shout out to Gabriel Pizza who came in person to verify my pizza order when they needed more information and got no answer calling me. This is one of the ways I found out that people can't call me.